OK, we all know, Vandal qualifies pretty well for the term ‘custom amplification’. It’s got enough of what it takes for that job.
Now people can go a step further and skin the thing a bit more to their liking.
With the next version, we allow for putting ‘overlay’ images over the stomps’ carpet as well as the guitar amp’s front cover. Using maximum opacity and an image of the same size, you can even fully replace carpet & amp cover.

The plugin accepts PNG files, with transparency. All you have to do is create a nice image, put it into a dedicated folder choose it from the list.

Imagine the plugin popping up with your band or studio logo. Or with a polaroid of your girl. No… we *don’t want* to know… 😉

We might provide a bunch of nice images on vandalamps.com as soon as time allows. Although… probably no girls.

We have been busy, as always.
OK, we’re not heading for 1123 stomp boxes. We can’t guarantee the same quality for all of them. So we went for just a few, initially. Hm… we’re now at 24 or so. Seems the program is maturing, evolving, as we move on.

The last weeks, 4 new stomps saw the light of day, all quite original approaches, no copycat-lookalike stuff:

new stomps

The bass distortion has pre- & post shaping, ready for deep fuzz as well as super-transparent growl. Kicks some bottoms, definitely.

The tube compressor is not a cheap compressor circuit with a waveshaper/distortion feature…. naaaahh. It’s indeed following those ancient variable-mu design principles, where a (push-pull) tube circuit compresses the audio by varying its own amplification factor (mu, µ). But you can drive it greatly into mild overload, and achieve massive & fat tone. Sometimes, it won’t even sound overly compressed, although it is. Weird.

Spacecake… Trippy little thing. Just two multitap delay lines, but they can do reverb, arranged in a crazy internal fashion, with lots of smear, micro-detuning, feedback, howl, flutter, you name it.

We’re currently testing all that s**t. We’ll be thorough, so it’ll perhaps take some time.

Also coming up next is the new ‘patch list’ architecture, on top of the preset mechanism. Consider you sending midi programs from outside… there, the trouble begins: what preset to load?

new midi patch list architecture

With the patch list, it’s dead-simple: just map an arbitrary preset from the disk to any of the 128 programs, save the whole list, and you’re done. You can even create unlimited lists. Ideal for those gigging every night, but having slighly different set lists.

Other aspects of midi control have also been greatly enhanced, such as scene control or midi cc handling. On schedule next for heavy testing.

We got a presence knob on the guitar amp, finally. Of course, it only makes sense for the A/B power amp, due to the principle (presence is the output wired back (phase-inverted & filtered) to the input of the power amp). Just like the real thing, it’s also dependent on the power amp’s overall amplification factor, thereby interacting with the ‘sag’ control. It’s good we designed the amp to be that dynamic, as ‘presence’ enhances that even more 🙂

New ‘Vintage Plate Reverb’ in the Rack FX section.

We then considered adding a plate reverb from algorithms we already had, but we ended up designing one from scratch, while getting lost somewhere in time. We finally came up with the ‘Vintage Plate Reverb’ as a convincing emulation of that tone we all know from the past decades. It somewhat reminds one of those legendary hardware reverbs that weren’t ‘perfect’ at all, in terms of naturalness, but offered a great deal of ‘character’. Now, this one is thick, lush, dense and ‘glues’ greatly with the input signal.
And it’s very light on the CPU (which normally is a contradiction).

Well then, the Vandal VST & AudioUnit Plugin is out since almost a month. We’re again (or still?) busy here, refining the current state and including new stuff. We are doomed to 😉

Here’s a quick view on what can be expected next:

Nothing spectacular on the UI, but the small LED saying ‘yes, there’s MIDI coming in‘ shall also serve as an indicator that we take MIDI seriously. We got to finalize certain parts of the architecture somehow, but such things are naturally not that visual.

Another thing we included was having the virtual microphones selectable on & off (now, is THAT rocket science or what???).

And we also added ‘delay’ knobs to the ‘tweak’ view of the cabinet simulation. These let you shift each mic in time to up to 25ms and offers for a vast palette of new sound textures. That can range from slight phasing artifacts to a complete twist of the cab sound. And you can easily create convincing stereo effects this way (engineers call this the ‘Haas effect’). The old ‘mic phase +/-‘ switches were replaced by simple push buttons to flip either phase, as we needed to save space. What was of minor importance before (the phase), can now have a dramatic impact in conjunction with the added delays.

While this blog will be kept updated with any non-marketing stuff, such as ongoing development details, vandalamps.com will probably your first point of interest concerning product orders, demo downloads, updates, additional presets and such.

We also have a bunch of audio & video files ready for you to listen to and watch. Within the next weeks/months, we’ll set up more content, providing more presets, additional videos etc.

We’d like to encourage everybody to get in contact with us, especially if you’re using the Vandal plugin and made cool presets or audio/video demos that we could post. If we can find you & Vandal on myspace or youtube, let us know as well. We want vandalamps to be as alive and vital as the plugin itself.
See ya! 🙂